This is a great short podcast on how to argue that talks about a lot of the same points I made earlier. It goes into additional detail about how to prepare and conduct arguments so that everyone benefits.
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 Image credit: flickr.com/photos/markfbennett/2223565383 DebatingLike most sports, I’m not much good at debate. I say it’s a sport because it’s a competition with a winner and loser where the participants’ skills have the largest bearing on the outcome. I think that most people casually lump debate and argument into the same mental bin; if not as exact synonyms, then as different degrees of the same thing. But they are really quite different! A debate has almost nothing to do with logic or the correctness of stated facts, but these things are crucial to the outcome of an argument.  Image credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/go_kusano/2679175875 As Orac states:
Science is a massively collaborative endeavor, with each researcher relying on the existing mesh of literature as a starting point for their own contributions. When everyone is being honest, a good methodology and peer review will prevent most obvious problems of bias and rigor. In other words, the facts are pretty well understood, and everyone has a pretty good idea about how robust various theories are. This is important, because it means when research is invalidated (or some theory is shown to be inferior to a new one), it tends to be an incremental change, not a destructive one. Anything we learn will update, clarify, and add to our existing understanding. Any new theories we employ will work at least as well as the old ones they unseat. Relativity is more correct than Newton’s laws, but that doesn’t mean apples must be re-checked to verify that they do in fact fall toward the earth instead of levitating or falling toward the moon. When a researcher repeatedly confabulates data in a case of massive fraud, it knocks everyone for a loop.  Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/takver/1963128315 Hybrid fusion-fission energy generation a possibility via Futurismic. Isn’t it interesting how this story swept through the internet? Everyone, of course, wants to get rid of nuclear waste right? Awful, evil stuff. Bury it in the earth if you have to. Making it disappear in a magic theoretical reactor is even better, what great news! But what struck me is how no one seems to realize that this is by no means the first idea for a reactor to deal with nuclear “waste”, and that the stuff isn’t really waste at all once you understand a little about it. Read on, and discover a whole nuclear world that you’ve probably never even heard of.  Photo credit: garryknight from flickr We suck at thinking, all of us– humanity. It’s poetically tragic given that we haven’t met any life forms who can do a better job of it yet. We skeptics enjoy thinking of ourselves as rational and reasonable, smugly superior among a vast sea of credulous, closed-minded believers. But we’re not nearly as clever as we think, nor are we very different from the true believers.
There are so many fallacies and biases that I can’t keep them straight, even though critical thinking is something I value highly. I’m not much good at debate, and although I’d love nothing more than to engender critical thinking and skepticism in others, I don’t have any good ideas on how to do that, except maybe hitting them with a WWIT? question. But what about aspiring skeptics– people who already have the spark of reason but haven’t yet learned to see the fnords on their own? I saw this somewhere on the Internet a few days ago and have since forgotten the source. But it’s so elegant that I want to spread the meme. Plus, a post on Friendly Atheist reminded me again.
That one sentence is all you need to figure out whether someone is capable of being reasonable about any particular subject. In fact, making people admit to themselves that they’re not willing to entertain any possibility of being wrong, could be enough to break the spell. From Skepchick:
That’s how I try to approach my whole life. It’s just as rewarding to “lose” an argument as to be right in the first place. Either way, it means I come out of the discussion feeling smart.
But that’s not why these things are a threat to actual real scientific medicine (ARSM?). The real danger is when CAM seems to get real results.
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There are many 
Jesus died for our sins. Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world. As much as that was repeated to me growing up, and as innocently as I believed it, I never really comprehended how it could work. Why should killing God produce any positive effect at all? Wouldn’t that be rather a black mark? Anyway why does someone dying impact someone else’s sin?